Indonesia's search-and-rescue team has identified the tail of AirAsia flight QZ8501 on the Java Sea floor. The WSJ's Deborah Kan speaks with Southeast Asia Bureau Chief Patrick McDowell about the recovery effort.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

... Indonesia the parties have announced they found that tail portion of Air Asia flight eight five oh one joining me now is Patrick McDowell I Jakarta bureau chief ... I think that's what exactly does this mean time for the investigation and ... in Amazon is the top of the bottom of this see how long will it take authorities act to get to this piece of the aircraft out of the water ... it's an important milestone in hunting for the wreckage of the aircraft ... in previous sightings through sonar ... aam on ... suspected large pieces of your car ... not even confirm tone of ... the two-day witnesses were Colorado ... the city and visuals citing a need in the fine details section ... these records and on the black boxes normally would be in detail is given clues to ... why the aircraft went down into boxes can be recovered ... there is no confirmation from the black boxes yet but the calming conditions ... two seems indicated they can make a lot more progress ... on users may have been doing the last ten days ... any sense have I how much of the aircraft back to this day has been recovered ... I in in this process ... people in need of decent eases of the aircraft and of course ... the remains of passengers and floating on the surface ... he's underwater sightings have been difficult ... on ... and there hadn't had one ... and when you really need to ... be bringing in large sections of the aircraft that ... is for later reading this process ... what they want to know is on the black boxes in you don't want this aircraft went down ... there's been a lot of speculation on whether rapid ... climate houses he got nothing to really confirm ... what his plane crashed ... at an end to end in Asian authorities today that ... tell time in four has happened what how long it'll take to get that piece out of the water ... they didn't say I don't intensely private donations right now ... you'll be into the investigators really how much of that and want to recover ... and when you are ... we have seen bits and pieces of the whole staying ... on the ICAC investigation the black boxes are the D C on here ... they need to get them as they need to download the information he to interpret it ... and then you ... are reading in March last year and that seems to think that ... ok and what about in terms of identifying victims on ... how many bodies as so far have been found ... approximately forty eight hundred and sixty two passengers on board have been recovered ... unification process and still slow ... I'll be less than half and actually identified so far ... I'm ... sure the doctors are going through the process slowly carefully and they're Grassley returning ... identify the names of families and so on ... at Cape thanks Fran that's a pack CheckMate dal for that day ...